OK – a titch over halfway through the year, and it’s been shaping up very well for me personally, all things considered. I made the last payment on the 30-year mortgage for my personal Patch of Paradise and received all but the last 2,000$ or so of the insurance payout for the accident that destroyed poor little lamented Thing the Versa. (A certain amount held out by the law firm to cover the final invoice on the medical scan which verified that yes, I had some bone damage to go with the simply awesome collection of bruises. Which payment invoice is lagging and lagging … yes, Big Government Medical matters proceed at the stately pace of a drugged Galapagos tortoise.)

These developments ease the necessity for tight budgeting and even allow for some frivolous expenses – a thing which hasn’t happened since the year that I spent in Korea doing outside voice-work. Some of those frivolous expenditures include being able to pay for overnight accommodations for distant-from-home book events. Alas, one of the big local book and music celebrations which I liked participating in was the West Texas Book and Music Festival in Abilene; and it seems that yearly event died the death during the Covidiocy. I can’t find any trace of it left at all in current social media, which was a pity, as I enjoyed getting there at least as much as I like participating. But the Giddings Word Wrangler is still a going concern, and I was invited to this fall. I hope to hear soon about Miss Ruby’s Author Corral in Goliad, too.

With luck, I think I will have finished Hills of Gold, the sequel to West Towards the Sunset by the end of the year. I have projected this as a YA historical adventure series relating the sequential adventures of the Kettering tweens and teens during pre-Civil War days on the western frontier: California and Nevada mostly, during the various gold and silver rushes there. The second in the series, focusing on Jon Kettering (a small boy in West Towards the Sunset, which focuses on his older sister, Sally), is about two-thirds completed in draft. I also had a glorious inspiration for writing a further adventure concerning a younger sister in the Virginia City, Nevada silver rush. Oh, and Jon Kettering himself becomes a Pony Express rider, during the crisis year that the Pony Express was a going, yet ultimately economically crushing concern.

I also have the long-promised final volume of the contemporary Luna City chronicles about half-done, and several notions to round out the various plot threads/story arcs:  the wedding of Richard and Kate, the eventual disposition of the legendary Mills Treasure, what happened to Joe Vaughn at the end of Volume 11 … all sorts of little things in the Most Perfect Small Town in South Texas. In the Luna City time line we are also coming up on the start of the Covidiocy. Also a couple of real-life people who I based characters on have since passed away … so it just seems like a good place to wind up the story. Not for good, though – I still have half a mind to do another YA series, with Letty, Douglas, Stephen and their other friends as kids in the 1930s. I’m seeing it as sort of an Americanized Emil and the Detectives, with their little group helping Chief McGill and Sgt. Drury solve small rural mysteries. But that has to wait on me finishing the Kettering series, of course.

This week I chanced upon watching the movie ‘The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society’, based on the recent bestselling novel. A relative rarity among novel forms of late, Guernsey Literary Etc. took the form of an epistolary novel, a conceit of plot and character-construction through letters from various characters. The movie version is a decent little movie; a relatively faultless evocation of a historical period, filmed mostly in charming rural locations and unscathed by any actor in it feeling a need to loudly bloviate on current social trends and controversies, at least as far as I know about.

Anyway, the epistolary novel isn’t much done these days; the last mega-huge bestseller in that form that I remember reading of my own free will was 1965’s Up The Down Staircase – a chaotic year in the life of an idealistic young schoolteacher on her first year in an interestingly dysfunctional urban school. Dysfunction then meant smoking cigarettes out behind the trash cans and dropping cherry bombs in the boys’ lavatory toilets, which seems rather charmingly retro, in comparison to present-day open riot in the hallways and violent assault in the classroom. Staircase was also made into a movie starring Sandy Dennis.

But the epistolary form was once overwhelmingly popular, especially in the 18th century. What has been accepted as the first-ever novel in English, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; Or Virtue Rewarded established the form. That novel began as a series of template letters, newly-literate, newly-well-to-do gentlemen and ladies, for the use of, only Richardson wished to incorporate moral lessons in the template letters and so created a narrative and characters to hang the letters upon. Pamela turned out to be so wildly popular on that merit that Richardson followed it with another such, even longer and more operatic: Clarissa Or the History of a Young Lady. This featured a young woman of imperishable virtue and her moral victory over a scheming vile seducer, who was not above kidnapping, drugging and rape of the heroine. This was also made into a miniseries in 1991, with Sean Bean as the vile seducer. He dies in the end, as is his customary habit in most (not all) movies and miniseries episodes in which he appears.

There are advantages to telling a story thusly; it is outright fun for a writer to basically create a character monolog and put on another voice and style, for however long or short – and sometimes very short. I’ve done a partial-epistolary in My Dear Cousin, and incorporated letters from characters in some of my other books. (TruckeeThe Adelsverein TrilogyThat Fateful Lightning.) It’s also an excellent means of incorporating a necessary info-dump or inserting a shorter account of what would be a tediously lengthy scene or account of a necessary sequence if done in full narration. There is scope for a modern version, with emails, memos-for-record, messages and blog posts, so the format is not exhausted by any means.

There are some disadvantages to writing a completely epistolary novel; it is all a sequence of monologues, and with a good writer, the character voice of every letter-writing character ought to be distinctive, differentiated from each other on the page. Given that not many scribblers of letters are given to write like a reporter, descriptions and conversations are … often sketchy, and more implied than actually included verbatim. I suspect that totally epistolary novels must be carefully planned and plotted in advance so as to be certain of including every necessary detail. The other disadvantage shows up more clearly in novels like Richardson’s Clarissa, wherein a five-minute long incident or conversation becomes the basis for a pages-long letter describing it in exhaustive detail. A brief sliver of action is measured off in yards, and yards and yards of verbiage which would have taken hours to write, giving one to wonder if these characters really did anything without a ream of paper in one hand, and an inkpot and pen in the other to memorialize the moment, rather like 18th century verbal selfie.
Discuss as you will – what other interesting epistolary or semi-epistolary novels are out there today?

22. May 2025 · Comments Off on Recollections of the Newsmaking Machinery · Categories: Memoir, Random Book and Media Musings

This blog entry by another author reminded me irresistibly of the period in late 1978 when there was a considerable turnover in the Vatican – in that a long-serving Pope passed away of more or less natural causes, followed by the usual ceremonies, followed again by the lengthy ceremonial ritual of the college of cardinals selecting and installing another pontiff. All these occurrences made for considerable news coverage through our network lead station, FEN-Tokyo, and some inadvertent hilarity on my part, listening to one of their staff announcers (owner of a magnificent resonant speaking voice and the most vacant skull ever recorded in the possession of an AFRTS broadcast specialist) repeatedly mangle the phrase “papal encyclical” in news releases. There was a good reason – several volumes of them, actually – that this broadcaster was famed as “The Ted Baxter of the Far East Network. He was a legend in his time…

Lo and behold, after  weeks of noting all these stories out of the Vatican (it was a very dull period with regard to major news developments in international news, I think) … Pope John Paul I passed away after barely three weeks and change in office. (The shortest Papacy on record, it seems – even counting some of the very earliest in the times of Roman persecution or later corrupt Renaissance shenanigans.) One of my NCO supervisors mused, “I guess the excitement was too much for him,” while my friend Marsh wailed despairingly, “You know what this means?! Another month of Dead Pope!!”

09. May 2025 · Comments Off on The Fun of Primary Historical Sources · Categories: Memoir, Old West, Random Book and Media Musings

I am working like a busy little literary beaver on the second of the YA frontier western series, the Kettering Family chronicles. I thought from the first to make the main and viewpoint character always a tween or teen, but making it a series and having the story romp over twenty years of interesting pre-civil war events in the various gold and silver rushes while still maintaining the viewpoint of a teen or tween. The work-around for that challenge means that now each book is planned to focus on the adventures and characters of consecutive Kettering children…

Anyway, the main character in the work in progress is Sally Kettering’s little brother Jon, and the early and curious days of the California gold rush. It appears as if the plot will keep the family in Sacramento. Which will be a nice change for me, as Sacramento is one of the places where I lived in real life. Only for a single year as it turned out – but I did enjoy the heck out of living there, visiting Old Town and the Railway Museum, as well as actually traveling up into the gold rush country – Coloma and Placerville – a couple of times. (To Truckee and Lake Tahoe, as well, if only briefly.) California was a livable, interesting, affordable and relatively sane place to live in once upon a time, so I have those recollections and local specific knowledge to draw upon.

But the other element is – old local histories. I have found a couple on Googlebooks, scanned and collected volumes retrieved from dusty and unfrequented and likely deserted library stacks. The closer in time to events recorded, is all the better for my purposes. Also, the more unfocused and gossipy is even better, for that becomes precious little nuggets, bits and bobs and curious personalities which make for a more authentic read, once carefully worked into my own narrative. I downloaded and read about a dozen 19th century Civil War women’s memoirs for That Fateful Lightning, even though I had a goodly number of professional modern historians’ references. It’s the same with this book – those chatty, rambling, first-hand accounts are pure gold.

19. March 2025 · Comments Off on Thinking About a Continuation · Categories: Random Book and Media Musings

A bit ago, I wrote about continuing stories, and one of the books of mine that I touched on was the story of the two cousins during WWII, Peg Becker Moorehouse and Vennie Stoneman Vexler in My Dear Cousin. The whole concept came to me in a dream, which is not a totally eccentric way to get a notion for a book, but one which has only happened once to me. But it was the one set of lives that I thought there might be a continuation for past the limits of an accounting of their lives before and during the war. That book ended on an optimistic note, with Vennie married to her perfect Mr. Darcy, and Peg and her children reunited with her husband, a prisoner of war by the Japanese.

There aren’t really happy endings in real life, I think – only happy intervals and if we are fortunate, those intervals are long ones. Otherwise, our lives are a sequence of dark and bright. As it happens, the end of the Second World War was one of those illuminated periods, although for some parts of the world there was just more of the same but with a different cast of characters after the summer of 1945. The Iron Curtain slammed down across eastern Europe, the survivors of the Holocaust fought to continue living in a sliver of a new nation in the ancient land of Israel, India was violently partitioned, and Communist-led and inspired insurrections or civil wars broke out across the Far East almost as soon as the ink on the Japanese surrender was dry.

When I looked at a couple of my books, speculating on possible but unwritten aftermaths, one of those speculations touched on the characters in My Dear Cousin. I wondered if Vennie would really adjust and be happy in the role of a stay-at-home faculty wife to an academic. After all, she had been raised on a rural ranch, trained and worked as a nurse, and had an adventurous war as a military nurse … would she really make a successful marriage to the product of a wealthy, and worldly East coast urbanite? I speculated that it would take a long adjustment time for that to happen. Perhaps they would separate for a time, and she would return to nursing,  rejoining the Army  as a military nurse in Korea.

The real-life couple whose experiences I based some of Peg and Tommy’s experiences in wartime Singapore and Malaya returned to their rubber plantation after the war – but eventually had to leave Malaya, when the Communist insurgency there made life too dangerous for their family to stay. I thought that Peg and Tommy, being from the same kind of background – one having grown up managing a rubber plantation, and the other as part of a ranching family – would have no more than the usual post-war PTSD to ruffle their marriage. But they also would have to leave, and start again somewhere else, probably Australia.

Anyway – the prospect of continuing with a matched set of characters, and the same concept of letters back and forth – is still in the formulative stage, but it is intriguing to construct: two different theaters, wracked by war and unrest, two women trying to cope and make sense out of it all. A historic irony to this is that in Malaya, the local Communist insurgents had been allies of the British, and supported by them during the war, while at the same time Korea had been unwilling allies of the Japanese. It has been reported that often the most brutal guards of Allied prisoners in the Far East were Korean draftees in the Japanese Army.

I’m just toying with the concept for now – I have two other books simmering on the burners for now – the final Luna City installment, and the Gold Rush YA sequel to West Towards the Sunset – but it’s not me, unless I have several projects all going at once…